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By Fancy Flours Employee Lindsey K.

Welcome back for our second tutorial in the Springerle series! We’ll be covering how to make a papercast using our beautiful House on the Hill molds. Papercasts have so many uses. Put them on cards, use them as tags, wall décor, ornaments… or wrap honey jars to make a personalized gift as we’ll show you today.

Missed our first post where we made Paperclay ornaments? See it here! You’ll also get a quick history of what a Springerle is.

We used cotton linters from Arnold Grummer, who specializes in paper supplies. Their linters are non-toxic so you can feel safe going from cookies to papercasts and back! Grummer has pages of ideas and a papercasting video that is very helpful for our visual learners.

For the darkened ivory effect shown in our tutorial: Use hot water, add two tea bags and let them steep for 4 minutes. The linters will dry slightly darker using the tea method than they appear when wet.

For color: Add colored tissue paper after you put in your linters (step 2). Start with small strips and blend. Add more until your desired shade is reached. Only use the tissue paper since it has paper dyes. Do not use other colorants. You can also add glitter for some subtle sparkle at this stage.

2. Remove the tea bags if you used them. Put a handful of paper linters into the blender and purée until it becomes a pulp.

3. Place your mesh strainer into the bowl. Pour a “pancake” of pulp into the strainer using a continuous, circular pouring motion. Make the pancake as big as your design. This saves you from having to reshape after the fact.

Tip: If the pulp isn’t coming out easily, you can add more water to the blender and re-pour.

4. Prep your workspace by placing a towel down. Have the sponge and drying rack within arm’s reach.

5. Dump the pulp from the strainer into your open, flat hand. Lightly press the pulp to remove some of the water, but you still want it to be very wet at this point. After pressing, plop the pulp onto the mold so it covers the whole design. (No need to coat the mold with a release agent). If you need more pulp, simply place it back in the strainer and pour more onto it from the blender. We used the Bee Skep for our honey jars.

6. Using the sponge, press out as much water from the pulp as you can.

7. Using a corner of the towel you’ve laid down, press the rest of the water out. Keep moving the towel to a dry spot as you press so that you can tell when most of the water has been extracted.

Tip: Make sure to press deeper parts of the design harder. For example, the bee’s abdomen. For particularly detailed spots, use your fingers to press the pulp into it.

8. “Deckle” the edges by placing your thumb along the edge of the design and pulling off the extra with your fingers or tweezers. This gives a fun, home-made look, but you can also use scissors after the mold is dry to create a clean edge.

9. Pick up the mold and turn it upside down. Gravity will be your aid. Lightly pull away all edges and carefully remove the cast.

Tip: If you’re unhappy with your cast, just toss it back in the blender and begin again!

10. Place your papercast on the drying rack and let dry 12-24 hours (depending on humidity). You can make as many casts as you have pulp in your blender by returning the poured water right back into it. The water will last 3-4 more handfuls of linters before needing to be replaced.

11. If you plan to color your casts, now is the time! After they’re dry, you can use acrylic paint, colored pencils or thin markers. We used colored pencils for this Cornucopia design.

12. Now back to our little bee! Gather your hot glue gun, honey jars, dried papercast and desired ribbon cut to the diameter of your jars. I put down aluminum foil and parchment paper to protect my work surface from the hot glue.

13. Using the hot glue gun, attach your papercast to the center of your ribbon.

14. Once that cools, wrap the ribbon and papercast around the jar and glue the two ends of the ribbon to each other.

15. Ta da! You’ve created a sweet personalized gift!

While I was at it, I made these cute napkin rings using the same method of attaching the cast to a ribbon.

Owner of House on the Hill, Connie Meisinger, created several other beautiful papercasts. Here they are for a bit of inspiration.

Guest Post By Fancy Flours Employee Lindsey K.

Welcome to our first post in a series detailing all the wonderful things you can do with a Springerle mold! We’ll be jumping a little ahead in time by making Christmas ornaments, but you can use any design to decorate gifts or simply your home year round.

But what the heck is a Springerle mold? We’ll start with a brief history.

The most common form of pronunciation is spring-er-lee, however, the traditional form is shpring-er-luh. The molds were originally carved out of clay beginning as early as the 14th century in Germany, Bavaria, Switzerland and the Alsace area of France. Their biblical pictures were transferred to cookies and breads to educate those who couldn’t read or write. The molds soon changed to wood and metal mediums and the pictures came to represent everyday life – weddings, animals, holidays, etc. While generally used to mold dense, cake-like cookies, the molds have a number of uses in the crafting world.

We use molds from the wonderful crafters at House on the Hill. They’re made of a sturdy wood/resin composite and are casts of actual vintage designs. Check here for our full stock.

And now to the fun stuff! We’ll be casting our ornaments in Paperclay and Delight. Why these mediums instead of regular clay? They’re non-toxic! So you can feel safe using your mold for baking as well as crafting. This could even be a family project!

Materials:

Paperclay or Delight (Paperclay is clay-like and ivory while Delight is a foam-like texture and pure white)

1. Knead your molding medium into a solid mass (we used Paperclay for this tutorial). Make sure there are no layers or your cast won’t come out cleanly. It helps to roll the dough rather than fold it. If your Paperclay seems dry, you can add a Tablespoon or less of water until it reaches the consistency you desire.

Tip: If you want your dough all one color, knead in a couple drops of acrylic paint to your desired shade.

2. Dust your work surface and rolling pin with cornstarch. We laid down our Tovolo Pastry Prep Mat before dusting. This makes for easier cleanup and your molding medium won’t stick to the table. Roll out the Paperclay as you would cookie dough.

Tip: Consider the depth of your design. Don’t roll your Paperclay thinner than the deepest part or you will lose the top details!

3. Use a pastry brush (or large new paint brush) to dust cornstarch into the mold. In a pinch, you can drop the cornstarch into the mold with your fingers alone, but the brush makes for even dusting and keeps your hands clean. Be sure to dust the mold with cornstarch before every pressing!

4. Lay the mold onto the Paperclay and use even pressure to push all sides and the center into it. Again, consider your mold’s depth and press accordingly. This can take some practice, but if you don’t like the imprint simply ball the dough and begin again. It helps to press at table height rather than counter height.

Tip: Only want a piece of the design? Lay your mold face up and press the dough into the part that you wish to use. You can cut any excess with an exacto knife, spatula or dough cutter.

5. Lift the mold and cut out your design. If you have a cookie cutter to match your design, great! Otherwise an exacto knife, spatula or dough scraper will work just fine.

Tip: Only do one press at a time. If you do more than one, your dough will squish together and warp your design.

6. Press your lollipop stick or straw where you would like to tie the ribbon. Coffee stirrers create nice small, neat holes and can be found at office supply stores. You can cut away excess Paperclay before or after this step.

7. Use a spatula to remove your imprint and place on a mesh cooling rack to dry 12-24 hours.

Tip: After drying, you can smooth edges by sanding with a nail file or oval foam cushioned sanding pad.

8. If you’d like to paint your designs, now is the time! Acrylics work great. We chose to paint the Pine Cone design.

Tip: For an extra smooth finish, paint a thin layer of white and let dry before applying other colors.

9. Pull your ribbon through the designated hole, tie it and you’re done!